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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Total Spent: $246.00| Rating: 8

Pros:

small and light, reasonable price, very good image quality

Cons:

nothing important

I have owned a number of aps-c cameras and lenses at this point and have concluded that size and weight are an important factor in the kind of photography I like to do, which is travelling and walking around. I find that this lens fits the bill very nicely. Of course the lens must also take very good quality photos, and this lens doesn't disappoint as long as you stop it down to f/5.6 or f/8, depending on the focal length. This is not a "bright" lens of course, but Nikon's new image stabilization is so much better than the old one that you can actually see it in the viewfinder; the viewfinder seems to be almost locked on the image so that even a good jiggle doesn't move the scene very much. This compensates quite a bit for the smaller aperture. I own the other two popular Nikon kit zoom lenses, the 18-140 and the 18-105 and am impressed with both. This lens offers similar image quality (with a much smaller zoom range) but with far less weight, and I expect that it will be the one I use the most for casual shooting. Please be aware that on my d7100 I had to set the AF fine tune to +6 or +9 for best results, similar to what I found with the 18-140 lens. C'mon Nikon, get it together with this focus thing!

gabrielvines

Registered: January 2015Posts: 13

Nikon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR II AF-S DX Nikkor review by gabrielvines

Review Date: 1/20/2015

Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Total Spent: $50.00| Rating: 7

Pros:

Weight, size, price, sharpness, color, contrast

Cons:

none for that price

My first results with this lens were astonishing!! At f7.1, corner sharpness, distortions, vignetting, contrast and rendition of colours were too good to be true and even upon pixel peeping the results (raw files), found nothing really to complain about. In IQ and IQ alone, this lens seemed way better than Canon EF-S 18-55, EF-S 18-55 IS and EF 17-40L (three lenses I've tried).

Am not going to rave about build quality but it is better than the Canon kit lenses. It is a bit slow to focus and hunts in low contrast situations but I can live with that. Left corners are noticeably soft at 55mm f8 onwards (have noticed this in two copies), however, left corner softness at 55mm is acceptable at f7.1. Doesn't handle flare too well but I am careful. Purple fringing can easily be rectified in PP. Vignetting has never been an issue for me with this lens.